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Just 14 People Make 500,000 Tons of Steel a Year in Austria (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg Businessweek feature: The Austrian village of Donawitz has been an iron-smelting center since the 1400s, when ore was dug from mines carved out of the snow-capped peaks nearby. Over the centuries, Donawitz developed into the Hapsburg Empire's steel-production hub, and by the early 1900s it was home to Europe's largest mill. With the opening of Voestalpine AG's new rolling mill this year, the industry appears secure. What's less certain are the jobs. The plant, a two-hour drive southwest of Vienna, will need just 14 employees to make 500,000 tons of robust steel wire a year -- vs. as many as 1,000 in a mill with similar capacity built in the 1960s. Inside the facility, red-hot metal snakes its way along a 700-meter (2,297-foot) production line. Yet the floors are spotless, the only noise is a gentle hum that wouldn't overwhelm a quiet conversation, and most of the time the place is deserted except for three technicians who sit high above the line, monitoring output on a bank of flatscreens. "We have to forget steel as a core employer," says Wolfgang Eder, Voestalpine's chief executive officer for the past 13 years. "In the long run we will lose most of the classic blue-collar workers, people doing the hot and dirty jobs in coking plants or around the blast furnaces. This will all be automated."
Nope. China took the jobs. List of countries by steel production. China produces five times as much steel as the EU, and ten times as much as America.
Steel is a really bad money-losing business to be in. An automated steel mill may seem clean, but you also need coal mines, coke kilns, limestone quarries, etc. It is better to let someone else make it, and just buy what we need.
It's OK because Donald Trump will retrain the steel workers so they can get a job at Blockbuster Video.
Why didn't they just employ thousands of people that just work for a few minutes a day? Oh yeah, reality kicked in. -_-
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
"We have to forget steel as a core employer," says Wolfgang Eder, Voestalpine's chief executive officer for the past 13 years. "In the long run we will lose most of the classic blue-collar workers, people doing the hot and dirty jobs in coking plants or around the blast furnaces. This will all be automated."
Tell me something I don't know like, for example, how will the economy work when 90% of the jobs are automated. Will we have a situation like in ancient Rome where the rich people who owned masses of slaves they used to bankrupt small businesses and farmers by undercutting them with cheap labour but then ended up feeding the unemployed citizen masses simply out of a deep rooted and very real fear of the unwashed citizen masses rising up, dragging the moneyed classes out of their luxury villas and either throwing them to the lions or just crucifying them in the atrium of their own luxury villa? Will our unemployed kids and grand kids be living off of handouts from the rich oligarchs who own the automated factories? ... and how will an economy work when only 10% or less of the population are employed either designing new robots or staring at flatscreen making sure that things are running smoothly?
It is better to let someone else make it, and just buy what we need.
Let THEM deal with the pollution, costs, etc?
If a steel plant can't be built and operated in the US as they are in China, then no one in the US should be buying steel from China.
What is considered inhuman working conditions here are inhuman working conditions there. What is considering environmentally damaging here is environmentally damaging there. Etc. Etc.
Just because it's "over there" doesn't mean that working conditions and environmental impacts are magically made acceptable
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I know people that used to work in steel mills years ago. You don't want those jobs! They are horribly dangerous!
One of the stories involved two coworkers walking on a catwalk above the blast furnace in full heat suits (think Jamie's suit from Mythbusters). One of the workers leaned on the railing and it let go. He was vaporized before he hit the surface of the steel.
The stories like this go on and on. People crushed between rail cars, etc. Sure, the steel industry paid really well, because it had to. The working conditions were so terrible, no one would work there otherwise.
This kind of extreme work environment is ideal for automation. I'd rather see a robot get destroyed in an accident than a person killed.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Steel is a really bad money-losing business to be in. An automated steel mill may seem clean, but you also need coal mines, coke kilns, limestone quarries, etc.
You could use Pepsi kilns instead of coke kilns. In blind taste tests 2 out of 3 diabetics preferred steel made using pepsi kilns.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
If it's dangerous and/or boring, it's better to have a machine do it.
Machines are getting better at a lot of things. My first time through college, I got a decent amount of PLC training, but those units are now entirely obsolete. Machine vision was a thing back then, but you needed a highly-specialized $6,000 ISA card just to grab frames and analyze them. Now, you can do it with a potato-grade webcam and a Raspberry Pi.
I went back to school to get updated on as much as possible since I want to do maintenance now that Electronics and PC Repair have both taken a massive shit with everything moving toward being disposable. The maintenance guys I've met are all retiring and companies are aching to hire young blood. On top of that, industrial control boards still use through-hole components for durability reasons and I can repair that stuff in my sleep.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
I grew up in Trofaiach, the town next to Donawitz (less than 10km from the steel plant). My grandfather worked there as an electrician from the 1950s to the 1990s. While I did visit the local Erzberg musem (there's an ore mining operation ~30km north of Donawitz in a town called Eisenerz where they have the kind of museums and parks you'd expect a site with such a rich history to have) during my childhood, I can't really remember what it was supposed to be like during the rule of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy - but the latest developments in the are are not very pretty.
Both Leoben (the city that Donawitz is a part of) and Eisenerz shed a MASSIVE amount of population - in the 1970s, Eisenerz was at ~15k inhabitants, while these days, I think it's less than 7k. Leoben fell from 42k people to ~18k or so. Since the steel industry has been privatized in the 1980s, thousands of jobs have been cut, while corporate profits soared - so whoever is still there and still has a job is pretty well off still. All in all, however, the whole Bundesland (federal state) of Steiermark/Styria (this is where Arnold is from :)), is pretty much perceived to be in a downward spiral since then, due to market forces at work - industry is lot cheaper to do elsewhere, and you can only compete so much on superior quality of product alone.
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YTARY!
Just go look at the older coal towns.(or mining) I've seen many through out the US.
They've dried up, the place remains a sad shell dependent on outside help. Many state and other officials try making deals with move in other industry, but it's never enough.
For example: Here in Utah, Price was a once such a town. They got Sorenson Communications to build a TTY(a deaf text to phone service) it still dries up.(w/ text being replaced by video)
Jobs don't materialize just because there are people wanting work. And not every person can be trained to do every position.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
Also, in such environment --- nobody will get rich selling the spoils from their factories, unless there's an economy of people to buy their products (If not, then the price will go down, until it approaches the now lower marginal cost of production which has been reduced due to the lower labor requirement).
Agreed. So, where will all these people with ready cash for buying the products get their cash from? You no doubt understand that there must be a significant volume of people making purchases so it can't be the 1% which sustain these factories. How will a significant portion of the 99% be able to make purchases when we reach this "next level" of which you speak? What is this next level? How does the transition to it begin and how do we all get the signal that we need to move to it? What or who makes the first moves?
Only I can judge you.
even if it is a trade war instead of a shooting war.
That is not how trade wars work. In a trade war, countries cut export prices, while raising tariffs to keep imports out. In a trade war, you can still buy whatever you need, you just can't sell what you have.
60% of steel produced in America is recycled from scrap, not forged.
If international trade in steel stops, that will hurt China far more than it will hurt the US.
I believe the headline says "Just 14 people make 500,000 tons of steel...".
This is wrong. These people are not making steel. They take steel that somebody else has made and turn it into wire.
They are making wire, not steel.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?